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Mesa Now Supports A Bit More Of OpenGL 3.0

Phoronix: Mesa Now Supports A Bit More Of OpenGL 3.0

While some Mesa developers spent some time this weekend investigating WebGL issues in open-source drivers as noted by Firefox developers, Brian Paul and others have been tackling support for some new OpenGL extensions...

patent issues?

this is weird. I thought OpenGL 3 is widely protected by various patents yet many GL3 functions are being implemented in mesa. So what's the story here? I'm not much of a legal guy so can someone point out what is actually protected by patents and cannot be implemented in free mesa?

I think somebody just broken the law (incl. the moral one) by including patented things in open standard.

Nope. Open means that the standard is available to all, and that the standard itself is not proprietary. The fact that something in that standard is patented is an unfortunate coincidence, not intentional.

For all intents and purposes, pretend that the patents were submarine patents. (They weren't, but the effect is similar.)

Seriously(really) there should be OpenGL and ClosedGL. The patented stuff should be dumped in the latter. This issue should reach Google and Kronos.

That's a horrible suggestion. OpenGL isn't some isolated graphics standard. It's a specification for allowing developers to access the features found in actual, real hardware. That's it. The fact that some of those features are patented is highly unfortunate, but we all expect OpenGL to fully expose the hardware capabilities, because otherwise OpenGL is immediately useless and the few holdouts remaining will all just jump to the Direct3D bandwagon.

The whole reason people are complaining about these patents is because we actually fucking need those features, not because we want to have Mesa change a single version number in its interface. A version number which is almost meaningless because you can implement the entirety of OpenGL 4.1 in an OpenGL 2.0 driver thanks to the extensions feature in OpenGL. There's no reason that Mesa can't have every single non-patented OpenGL feature in its core today other than a lack of manpower. The version number is a convenience at absolute most.

Personally, I'm not worried about the patent situation in terms of usability. If the functionality is available in a separate branch, we can still fetch that (in the free world) and compile it, just like we do with the freetype stuff and LAME.

What is worrying me is that some of this patented stuff will end up not being developed at all, because nobody wants to risk it.